


faulty

by pyrokinetic



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Inspired by Poetry, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Short One Shot, may revisit this fic later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-07 05:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15901599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrokinetic/pseuds/pyrokinetic
Summary: Simon is an old model - one destined for replacement, bargain deals, deactivation.It's an inevitable eventuality.





	faulty

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the poem Faulty by Leila Chatti (link in the end notes). i like the thought of simon reading poetry and thinking on it a bit too seriously
> 
> [obligatory fuck david cage goes here]

Years after waking up and the delicacies of living are still much too complex for Simon to reach out and take hold of. Each day brings with it a new challenge, a new setback. Where once he offered his hands and prostrated himself, he now hesitates. He holds still and, with a bent back, curls in on himself.

He is an old model - one destined for replacement, bargain deals, deactivation. Like any technology, his obsoleteness would have spelled his end. An inevitable eventuality.

 

* * *

 

The sweatshirt is Josh’s, and it is the first thing that Simon owns. It is warm, comfortable and soft, well-worn and loved. There is a history to the garment that Simon yearns to know, but finds the question sticks to his throat whenever he means to ask. Josh smiles when he sees him wear it.

They are like-minded in that what they want is to exist and learn how to feel out the world around them in their own time. Josh is much more equipped to do so than Simon, and often speaks of philosophy - the concept of generosity and whether one can be altruistic in its truest form. Existentialism and deviancy, determinism and the android condition. Simon spends hours, then spends some more listening to whatever catches Josh’s attention.

Perhaps, if he can absorb his musings, then he can begin to feel alive. He can begin to experience happiness without the wave of anxiety - the worry that everything will be taken from him, and soon. The dread of shutting down. Of feeling his biocomponents malfunction one after the other.

Simon runs hot a lot of the time, processors working hard, and he knows with certainty that his lungs will be the first to go.

North is new and nerve wracking, not because of who she is, but because of how she acts. Her viciousness is a relatively new concept that causes Simon to want to shrink even further into himself. He is, however, at heart a PL600, and though outdated, knows how to talk her down, at least for a few hours. Josh’s attempts at the same go horribly wrong.

 

* * *

 

Simon touches the page with his fingers, gently rubbing over the words, lingering on _loved_ and _good_ and _faulty_. Something in him settles - not happy, but a settling nonetheless. Poetry intrigues him in the sense that some lines reach into his chest and grip his thirium pump while others just exist for him to glance his eyes off of and move on.

He likes the familiarity of Eavan Boland, of Denise Levertov, and Leila Chatti - _we will live, we have lived_. He sees North as _burning down. As a house might. As a candle will. She is ash and tallow_. Josh _listened to sunlight, and flowed, onward, unhurried_.

If _to be loved is to be good_ and _to be loved is good_ , then Markus is good beyond what Simon can measure.

O, rA9, he would die a thousand deaths to keep that man alive.

The gun pointed at his head is both surprising and not. The shaky hand attached to the gun and the devastated, conflicted look on Markus’s face is not. Everything hurts.

And then it doesn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686599/summary (idk how to embed links yet lol)


End file.
